If you were asked to show examples of beautifully typeset documents in TeX & friends, what would you suggest? Preferably documents available online (I'm aware I could go to a bookstore and find many such documents called 'books'). Extra bonus for documents whose LaTeX source is available.

This is not an idle question. Seeing great examples of any craft is both educational and inspiring, let alone explaining why we prefer TeX to Word or other text editors.

For instance, I like how Philipp Lehman's Font Installation Guide looks. I don't know enough LaTeX to realize how much customization was done, but the ToC looks polished.

Interestingly, the font installation guide probably doesn’t even have that many customizations, at least by the looks of it. Rather, the polished looks come from a very few choice adjustments.
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Konrad RudolphAug 8 '10 at 8:53

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I really like the microtype manual PDF. Since it's nicely using PDF features like layers and such to create an appealing document.
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Johannes Schaub - litbAug 15 '10 at 14:46

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It seems to me that the font installation guide was set-up in a more elaborated way in previous versions. Am I missing something or confused with another document?
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plutonOct 1 '10 at 2:18

68 Answers
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It features image lettrine and OTF features using XeTeX, specifically the advanced features from the open-source EB Garamond font, some of which were implemented specifically for this project (thanks to Georg Duffner's great reactivity).

The project is still a work in progress (the marginpars can be improved) and only features one page so far.

Edit:

After reworking a few details, I ordered a printed copy recently, using zazzle:

Edit on 2015/07/07:

Fixed some details in the first page, and added a second page, featuring the EB Garamond Initials font.

Wow! @agodemar have you though on open sourcing it? At least the figure code, it must be awsome!
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perr0Jan 15 '13 at 1:19

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What did you use to create the figures?
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marczellmJan 15 '13 at 18:13

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@marczellm Most of the figures are made with Inkscape; annotations are made using Inkscape's the "Render LaTeX formula" feature. Some figures with 3D scenes were made with Sketch and annotated with tikz. Some other scenes were made with Blender some other with Cinema4D.
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agodemarFeb 8 '13 at 16:57

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@PagliaOrba For the picture on the right-and-page above I used captionof from the caption package, combined with fine-tuned makebox and risebox commands. I didn't care about being in odd- or even-numbered page.
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agodemarFeb 28 '13 at 14:06

I was asked to publish complete code of bilingual dictionary typesetting in LaTex. I have added also two images of final result. Update: You can preview the result in PDF of example letters here

The work is still in progress. I will apreciate any comments and advices. I humbly admit that this is actually a community coolaborative work that helped me step by step to add usefull functions to the code. Thank you !!!

If I can be allowed to plug my own project, my page for Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy shows off 6 different PDFs for different page sizes, including eBook versions, produced with the same core source file. The source is available too. However, it was also one of my first LaTeX projects and I’m a bit embarassed by some of the messiness in the code.

I use LaTeX to typeset my roleplaying game (RPG) projects. Since I received some "Is this really LaTeX?" comments, I'd thought I might share them here, as they go beyond the usual scientific background. The text however is German only. Maybe notable are:

ROBiN, a Robin Hood / medieval themed 80-page book (work in progress, take a look at the "eBook" version)

The first two use a common style with replaced images like backgrounds. For this style, (Xe)LaTeX source (Autorenpaket, author's package for creating own RPG scenarios) using neutral blue images is available.

Amazing work. Since you post it here, is there any way you will share the sources, too? You really nailed the usual RPG book look. Regarding your WiP book I have one point of critique if I may and that's the small caps. They look fake at times, especially for "Kämpfe" for example. Are they?
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ChristianJun 25 '12 at 6:40

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Thanks for the feedback. The fonts are the reason I am currently migrating from pdflatex to xelatex which should give me better control about font families. I've already been asked about sources, too, and am trying to come up with a solution, once I clarified some legal/license implications.
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TeXterJun 26 '12 at 4:23

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Perhaps you might consider LuaLaTeX, too. I found it easier to use but then I don't use a Mac. Good to hear about your plans to open-source these documents. I hope you can sort out the legal stuff :)
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ChristianJun 26 '12 at 7:14

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Some sources are now available, for a link see the main article.
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TeXterDec 31 '12 at 8:48

I am also quite pleased with how LaTeX and Friends turned out. The following are some comments about the design.

I tried to implement a proper grid layout, with the text on the verso page backing up the text on the recto. This turned out to be a real challenge. For some reason the grid package didn't work, so I had to do it myself. It's almost perfect, but sometimes it just didn't work. I didn't want to spend too much time on it, so I decided to compromise and manually adjust when necessary. I want to reimplement this properly when I know enough about the LaTeX3 packages.

As explained in the colophon of the book, I had two main concerns when I designed the page layout.

I wanted figures and tables that could run into the margins. With program listings this is almost always needed; also this would let me typeset input and output side by side.

I wanted the figure and table captions to the side. That way, long explanations would not be so disruptive.

The following is an example (the pagenumbers aren't correct).

The following shows why letting figures run into the margins is useful every now and then.

The itemize and enumerate environments have their bullets and numbers in the margin, which works well.

The description labels were also set in the margin, but sometimes I adjusted the labels by hand:

When the labels started with the same words, I moved those words into the margin. See for example chapter 8 (Mathematics): defining the current style, and defining the next environment.

When the labels ended with the same words, I moved that part of the label into the text (see e.g. page 117: demonstration tables and reference tables).

It gives some extra emphasis to the labels. The following is an example of two facing pages with labels in the margins.

The back pages of the part titlepages feature pictures of paintings by Billy Foley (I have two of his paintings). They look stunning. The following are two examples. The first is one of his older pictures. The second a more recent one.

Initially, I had another design, which was based on a picture with fish by Escher. Unfortunately, the Escher Eoundation wouldn't give me permission to do so. The design also featured a nice joke with the title page, which had the picture on it. the picture was drawn with TikZ. When you got to the next page, you could see the exact same page, but with the control points of the spline elements.

I also had a little ornament that had the fish lined up in a horizontal direction. The ornament was used to mark the end of the chapters. In ASCII art, it would look like this (each * is a fish and the fish interlock in horizontal and vertical direction, with a little space between them):

* *
* * *

You may find metapost source for the fish on my metapost pages. It's the source of the first fish pictures on the Escher page.

Without trying to imitate any particular book or style, I tried to evoke the beauty of ancient publications (very far from the illuminated books of he Middle Ages with Gothic or Uncial fonts, which are difficult to read for modern people).

The idea was add only add some fourier-orns ornaments, color, lettrines and old style numbers (except in math mode) once so popular. The type font is Palatino, that looks old but not
strange for people (who mostly will be not aware that is not the usual Times Roman).
There are not ligatures nor random small missplacing of old printing presses, but protrusion and expansion of the microtype package help in recreate slight imperfections preventing printing characters always with exactly the same size. Paper is artificially aged with wallpaper package with a simple backgroud.

The two sample pages below (with nonsense dummy text, biologist please ignore the content) have been joined by the inner margins with Gimp, to simulate their appearance in a paper book.

Edit: I planned to post the code when it was more polished and it could be used as book template... But I never have time to do it, so as requested, here it is, as is. In graphicx package have been included the [demo] option and \TileWallPaper has been commented to make it compilable without images.

Here is a page from a simultaneous Romanian/English liturgy used in the Romanian Orthodox church that I typeset. I don't know if it qualifies for beautiful, but I'll let you decide. I used an archaich Romanian font for the headings, parcolumns for the side-by-side text, and LilyPond for the scores.

edit: There's now http://www.liturghie.net/ where the full PDFs are available (also in other languages besides English). Source code will eventually make its way on to GitHub as I clean it up. The whole thing is obviously work in progress.

A recent edition to the pstricks family is a set of "Vectorian ornaments" used for decorating text. It At the moment (don't know whether it might be expanded) it includes 196 ornaments, listed by number:

@francescostablum: If writeLaTeX is anything like ShareLaTeX, you should be able to upload files to your project. In this case, upload psvectorian.pro and psvectorian.sty from psvectorian.zip to your project and compile away. The .pro file contains all the coordinate drawings for the ornaments in PostScript, while the .sty provides the LaTeX-side macros so you can use them.
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WernerMar 12 '14 at 17:59

One of the most interesting books typeset with TeX that I know, is "Trees, Maps, and Theorems" by Jean-Luc Doumont. It offers beautiful typography down to details such that each paragraph is typeset as a perfect rectangle (which means a lot of textual rewriting, so whether this is a good idea I leave open). But it makes a wonderful coffee-table book, with a lot of very useful advice inside.

\raisebox{0pt}[0pt][0pt]{\Large%
\textbf{Aaaa\raisebox{-0.3ex}{aa}%
\raisebox{-0.7ex}{a}%
\raisebox{-1.2ex}{r}%
\raisebox{-2.2ex}{g}%
\raisebox{-4.5ex}{h}}}
she shouted, but not even the next
one in line noticed that something
terrible had happened to her.

Or to show that pi is rather long... (based on diminuendo from from the Tex showcase):

I scarcely cannot believe, that Christoph Schiller’s herculean 20 years effort of writing a
free physics textbook Motion Mountain is not on this list. Despite his criticism of LaTeX, which itself is interesting to read, the six volumes are produced with LaTeX. Beautifully typeset in MinionPro and Myriad extended by Johannes Küster’s Minion Math.

If I had to choose one project of which I wanted to see the LaTeX source of, it would be this book.

Christoph Bier's typokurz is beautiful and useful; it's a 15-page guide to (German) (micro)typography in a nutshell. While it's just an article lengthwise (scrartcl, to be precise), it masterfully modifies many features frequently discussed on Tex.SX: section-titles, tables, footnotes, marginnotes, header ...

What's even better is that the preamble is available as well, it even is extensively annotated, but – that will be the downside for most users here – in German, just like the entire document is. Nonetheless, non-German speakers might still find their way around as well as some inspiration in the source code.

I really like the documentation of Philipp Lehman. The Font Installation Guide was mentioned in the question, but I also think for a simpler article (rather than the book style) his package documentation is hard to beat aesthetically, e.g. biblatex's

I wonder why nobody suggested the original works of Donald Knuth. To me they are beautiful examples of typesetting. As far as I know, his books and papers are typeset using TeX (vs. LaTeX), but for the sake of the topic, I guess, it doesn't matter.

Some examples:

The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP)

The TeXbook

The METAFONTbook

The complete list of Knuth's publications as well as preliminary drafts of the TAOCP Vol 4a chapters (in post script files) can be found on his home page. The sources of the TaOCP book (tex files) are also available in peer-to-peer networks.

I have to agree with TAoCP (can’t speak for the rest). As for why nobody has posted them yet, I think the implied assumption in the question was that the source code is available so that one can see how the layout is produced.
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Konrad RudolphJan 15 '11 at 12:18

I'd like to add two new "styles of typography" which I created recently. The content is not exactly impressive but perhaps the typography is.

The first example document contains more of a regular "book style", with strong influence from the "tufte"-class, although I used somewhat different body text and captions. Here are the first four pages of the second chapter:

I also tried something more experimental. This more futuristic approach does not contain serifs, shows excessive use of notes in the margin, and it uses drop shadows for most figures. Also, I used a slightly less invasive colour pattern. Whatever, I just wanted to twist some rules. Here are some example pages (the real content has been substituted with sample text due to confidentiality issues):

EDIT:
There have been requests on making the source code available. Since I don't want to release the full source, I've instead made a template available that you can then adapt to your own document. If you heavily base your own thesis report on this template I would appreciate if you made a small acknowledgement somewhere. Other than that - go nuts! =)